Yes, their competitors made mistakes. So did Microsoft.
Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Blackbird. Etc.
The difference being that Microsoft had their monopoly to fall back on when their other attempts failed. Their competitors did not.
Bill is going for the "humble" bit now. But that's not how it happened.
It wasn't just the monopoly. It was how they used the financial strength to strengthen and extend that monopoly.
The 80s and early 90s were desktop software's landrush era. Too many companies acted like this was a mature market, when the key was grabbing all the customers you could early on to lock in future cash flow. Would be competitors tried to become premium brands and charged too much when they needed to grab customers. It was like establishing a "beachhead" just above the low-tide mark.
Many MS competitors also lost their credibility when they went from pushing customers onto their platform to abandoning it, repricing it, or repositioning it, effectively yanking it out from under them overnight.
Back in the early 90s, the Microsoft monopoly cast a pall over the industry. But many managers who knew Microsoft had inferior products, who detested its monopoly power, nonetheless trusted Microsoft. Microsoft used its cash to make things predictable. So, in 1996, a developer could jump on the Windows CE bandwagon, even if it would be five years or more before Microsoft overtook Palm. Microsoft understood the value of owning platform "real estate", and it used its cash reserves to keep projects that involved long term user and developer commitments alive. It never used its cash for paying dividends to stockholders.
Think about the vendors Microsoft failed to dislodge. There aren't many, but one that comes to mind is Oracle. Oracle isn't a "nice" company either, but it had two things going for it. It was consistent in the face of the Microsoft challenge, and it was flexible as well. You needed both. Oracle never redefined its core products in a way so radical it pulled the rug out from under it customers. On the other hand, it watched Microsoft carefully, ensuring it always had a slightly more powerful product at the same price for anything Microsoft had. They'd also happily take you to the cleaners if you didn't do your homework, but if you did do your homework and your people knew how to use it, you'd have no rational reason to jump to SQL Server unless you were the kind of manager who lets vendors make platform decisions for you.
Apple used to have a position in the high end corporate desktop. Truckloads of peecees were being delivered to the peons, but the executive offices were Mac territory. This obviously wasn't a sustainable position. Apple also lost developers because it showed itself ready to court them one day and piss on them the next. It was too inconsistent for a developer to trust, failing to finish promised technologies (Pink), pulling the plug on ones it delivered (OpenDoc), or leaving the future uncertain on others (AppleScript, which was abandoned then unabandoned). Many Apple developers after being burned a couple of times looked at the size of the peecee market, and jumped ship.
Novell, on the other hand, was constent in its core product, but it was too consistent, failing to react in a timely fashion to the customer need for a reasonably stable platform for third party services, then to the customer need to provide TCP/IP based services, and they were way late on providing a GUI that would make the product less forbidding for new customers.
These days, the "competitor" that replicates what is most attractive about Microsoft to the customer is open source. Open source also takes its time but gets there in the end. When you are doing software where the user is the critical interface, it's very hard to get it right the first time. Apple is one of the few vendors who usually does. Microsoft customer wisdom is to wait for version 3. My wife was asking me
Without ever offering any viable alternatives and shunning the actual alternatives we have.
You are dealing with a strawman. It's not that environmentalists aren't for renewable technologies, but that's a long term strategy. The one thing that every single environmentalist who isn't just a crackpot has been advocating for the last thirty years is energy efficiency, and that's a great, untapped resource today.
People are howling over gasoline prices, because they've got a huge fraction of their income invested in gas guzzlers they can't give away at current gas prices. If CAFE standards had been raised the way environmentalists have been suggesting for decades, then these people would be taking four dollar gas in stride.
As far as the nuclear -- er -- option is concerned, you're acting like environmentalists outlawed nuclear power. It's not illegal to build a nuke. Although pressure groups did play a role in inflating the cost of clearing regulatory hurdles, it's not really worse than other controversial things that developers do all the time. What really killed nuclear power was this: electric market deregulation and cheap, cheap fossil fuels.
The nuclear financial model is that you make a huge investment, but reap profits for years an years pretty much for the operation cost of the plant. In a way, it's not that different from the business model used by companies installing photovoltaic panels and charging a fixed price for the power produced to the site owner. Just on a massively larger scale.
Tweak the cost of electricity downward a bit, an that huge investment looks a lot less attractive.
Basically, they stopped building nukes because the designs they had weren't profitable to invest in. Pressure groups did play a role, but if you step back and look at everything else that happened in the energy market, it's a prety small one.
Blaming people doesn't get anything done, that's correct...but what happens when a "movement" spends decades raising fear about something that would never happen and then rescinds on their proverbial deathbed? Well forgive me, but the movement's been saying for years that petroleum dependency is a bad thing, and that prices were going to rise, and that we ought to get out ahead of this problem. That's why its rich when anti-environmentalists, who called us prophets of doom, blame us for lack of action on this.
The question isn't whether the government can do this legally. The question is whether it is good for the country.
It's a hell of a lot different from building highway infrastructure. It's more like saying we're going to have 1,000,000 more Ford Explorers on the road in twenty years.
If you want a direct analog, then lets talk about a national superconducting grid that will allow producers anywhere to sell to any other part of the country. That would be good for the country. It would be good for the nuclear industry the way the highway system is good for the automobile industry. And it wouldn't give people choices rather than making choices for them.
The problem is with what economists call non-excludable benefits. Invest in a utility serving NYC, and you can richer. Invest in electrifying Podunk, you make the people Podunk a lot richer, but maybe not yourself. If the government doesn't provide for those people, they won't be provided for, even though it's a net win for everyone all around.
Since I'm a lot closer to socialism than you are, I probably can see more difference between state planning, socialism, and economic progressivism. They're three different things.
FDR wasn't a socialist, he was a pragmatist. He saw things that needed doing that the private sector wasn't going to, and he did them. I don't see the need for the government to say how many nukes we have. If the technology is there, and if the distribution infrastructure is there, both issues I think the government should be part of, then the right number of nukes will be built, along with the right number of wind farms, ocean thermal plants, photovoltaic plants, etc.
The problem is that computers are so darn useful, there's no way to make them so useful without making them useful for malware. The answer is, you build your own dedicated Skype phone that (a) only does Skype and (b) uses read only media for everything it can.
Personally, I wouldn't worry about bugs planted inside a phone, except possibly of software variety. How long before this happens with a smart phone? It's much easier to tap the lines for analog phones.
It was called the "planned economy". If you reckoned the economy needed 100 units of steel mills and 50 units of aluminum factories, but private individuals built 150 units of steel and 25 units of aluminum, you'd take money from steel to ensure that an additional 25 units of aluminum were brought online.
Not coincidentally corporate welfare is exactly the same thing, only you don't tell people they aren't allowed to build steel mills. Instead, you just take money away from everyone, and give it to the aluminum producers. As a result fewer of everything else gets built, including steel mills. What we have here is a proposal to have the government guarantee to the nuclear industry that at least two nuclear plants per year will be built on average, every year for the next twenty years.
Speaking as a free-spending political liberal, that's too much even for me. I'd be all for giving some government grants and regulatory relief to enable several pilot plants for new technologies to be built, to help the industry get back on its feet. But after that, they're on their own. I'm for technology research (which conservatives view as interfering with the market), but at least I don't think the government should be in the business of putting nuclear power's competitors out of business.
The problem is that the environmentalist movement is not made up of technically savvy people.
Oh, is the "Environmentalist Movement" the new "Democrat Party" now?
The truth is that the environmental movement is made up of all kinds of people, some of whom are of course luddites, some of whom are extremely technical, but get their techie jollies from things like energy saving technologies and alternative energy.
The problem is people who think they can solve the world's problems by selecting a label, applying it to people as a way of saying everything is their fault. This works when Mom and Dad are around to clean up the mess, but in the grown up world, you quickly find out that blaming somebody else doesn't get anything useful done.
The problem is too many people depending on somebody else to be the responsible adult.
The truth is that petroleum is a commodity that is, as far as we know, limited. Too many of us, however, acted like cheap oil was a permanent feature of the world. And now they're looking for somebody to gripe about.
So now it's the fault of the people who chose to drive the smallest car they could to cut down on pollution, or to live close to where they work, or to find a job where they could telecommute or take public transportation. Worse yet are the people who chose careers in things like alternative energy technologies and conservation. Nobody liked those people anyway, so it must be their fault we don't have fusion powered SUVs.
It is not really your fault. It is the fault of the hysteria-spreading, anti-nuclear, tree-huggers. Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. I see you have a great deal of substantive, sophisticated discussion ahead of you, so I'll just leave you to it.
In fact, the idea that we need to choose "an option" is what's broken about our politics. I agree, nuclear power has an important role to play in dealing with a transition to a post-petroleum economy. But I don't think people who look at it as a quick fix ought to be in charge of energy policy.
There's way too much talk about taking measures to bring energy prices down fast, and soon. Both parties do this. The Democrats want to punish the energy companies. The Republicans want to do things that will reward energy companies over the next four or five years by allowing them to drill in environmentally sensitive places. Neither of these are going to do much for the current situation, and both will do damage in the long term.
While it is true that today's petroleum prices are harbingers of things to come, they are also largely driven by speculation which performs an important economic function. In the relatively short term, prices will fall again, not to historic lows, but low enough to feel like relief. Then they will rise again. But the baseline prices will ratchet up, slowly. We can't deal with the long term problem by addressing the short term symptoms.
We can pump ANWR and the coastal reserves dry in a few decades, mainly to the benefit of other countries. Or we can bring some on line in the near future, and leave some in reserve against a future when today's energy prices would be a welcome relief. We can steadily develop our nuclear technology over the next twenty years, allowing the gradually rising cost of petroleum to do its work in fostering efficiency and innovation. Or we can build a lot of old tech plants NOW that will be very expensive to keep running and more expensive to shut down later.
Our current situation was not exactly impossible to predict. It was denial that made it a surprise. Now we're acting like the sky is falling, which is just the flip side of the same broken thinking. We need a more diverse energy portfolio, an energy distribution infrastructure that will support a more diverse portfolio, and greater efficiency. Nuclear power is part of that picture, over the next two or three decades. But it is not an "option" in the sense that it is a new basket in which we can put all of our energy eggs.
How about stop going around being so trigger happy about sacking and prosecuting people for such "crimes"? For the same reason for any zero tolerance policy. If you didn't fire somebody when something breaks, you'd be responsible for fixing it.
When something bad happens, and you fire somebody you are, by the strictest interpretation of the words, "doing something about it." It might not be anything effective, but if you don't know what is effective, then "doing something" sounds a lot better than "doing nothing."
Out of all the ineffective ways of of "doing something", firing somebody is the most attractive, because it localizes the blame in a person who is, or at least in short order will be, outside the organization. It is the solution that shifts the most blame. Since the person is outside the organization, he can't defend himself.
Well, given that said company wants the country to do something about it, then whether the way they set and enforce prices is legal in that country is certainly a relevant question. If Microsoft is calling upon China to enforce its intellectual property laws, it can hardly complain if China agrees, but also insists on enforcing its anti-trust laws.
The truth is that democracies do most of the things that fascist states do. The difference is the rules (or lack of rules) under which they do them. Having the police break in the door of a private residence.... does that make a government fascist? Not if the occupants are on the upper floors shooting at passersby. Not if there is a proper warrant issued under rules which respect democratic principles. Although it is harsh, a democratic government can reasonably suspend the normal habeas corpus procedures in certain situations. But this doesn't mean the rights protected by those procedures disappear. That's why it is a "suspension". When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus,it was later ruled that convictions obtained under that situation were invalid, because the civil courts were capable of operation.
The important point is that the necessity of an extraordinary action for one purpose, like maintaining public order during an insurrection, is not a key to open up new government powers. That is the path to being a cryptofascist: start with things that even legitimate democracies do in extreme circumstances, then water down or twist the rules so that they don't limit anything you want to do. You don't want a unitary executive, even if might help the President protect you in a post 9/11 world, because that leaves you with no protection from him.
Any counterinsurgency manual is going to have a lot of ugly looking stuff in it, like warrantless searches. The questions are how and when are those procedures allowed, and how is accountability enforced? By far the most troubling powers the government claims for itself is the power to distort the truth, because that undermines two key principles of a free society: the autonomy of individual decision making, and the accountability of the government. Any process that corrupts individual decision making or allows the government to evade responsibility for its failures strikes at the foundation of democracy. Since we live in an era of global information, there is no difference between a psy-ops campaign aimed at a foreign population and one aimed at the electorate.
Giving misinformation about things like troop movements is both critical, and harmless to democracy. Claims that a program is working when it is not are probably inevitable. But controlling information to make things look more successful than they are is where a government crosses the line into authoritarianism.
Fortunately, I don't really believe that this kind of disinformation has all that much utility for the things we supposedly need them for. I just don't think you can effectively lie to the Iraqis about how well reconstruction is going, because the Iraqis are there. It's all well and good to get our point of view out there, but you can't tell people day is night when they can see for themselves. It's only the American people who are likely to be taken in.
In the long run, I think we're better off being credible when we talk about our successes and failures.
I second the Moka machine. I've found the coarseness of the grind doesn't really make that much of a difference to how well it works. Sometimes it might leak a few drops around the seal, but it's not a critical problem. I've brewed American drip grind coffee (because it was all I had handy), and it came out as good as it ever does. It does fine with preground "espresso" grind coffee, producing as you say a cup of coffee that is perhaps a bit less syrup like than bar coffee, but every bit as tasty. Seriously, with a $20 pot, it's hardly worth worrying about if it will "work"; you just put water and grounds in and get coffee out a couple minutes later. It's not like you're going to void the warranty or something.
The Moka pot is extremely fast, and most importantly very easy to clean, which is the downfall of many coffee makers.
In fact it's so convenient I'm thinking of getting a single cup pot. Sometimes I get fresh dark roasted beans and put them in the freezer. Then when I want a cup of coffee I grind them in a brass Turkish coffee grinder, and brew them up in a Moka for a real treat -- better than what you get in most coffee bars over here. The problem is that it takes too long to hand grind enough coffee for six cups.
With a single cup pot I could go from whole beans in a freezer to a fresh cup of Moka in maybe five or six minutes.
I used to think about getting a home espresso machine, but since I've been using the Moka, I have lost interest. I actually think the Moka pot is cooler. The expensive machines like when you go to somebody's house and they pull out a bottle of $100 wine and it's pretty good. Of course it's good. The Moka machine is like going to somebody's house and drinking a great glass of wine, then he shows you the bottle and it has a $12 sticker on it. The guy who can find a great $12 wine is the one who really knows what he's doing.
If I had almost $2000 to drop on a coffee machine, I'd get a bean roaster, an electric grinder, and couple of 12 cup Moka pots. I'd be ready to churn out better coffee than any home machine, and faster too, with enough money left over to keep me supplied with top notch unroasted beans for a long time. You can get a 5lb bag of unroasted estate Jamaica Blue Mountain for a bit over $30, but roasted whole beans will set you back more like $40/lb.
Of course, I'm not really that into coffee (I can stop any time I want), so preroasted, preground coffee does fine for me.
The single, fundamental software design principle that underlies every other one is this: every decision should ideally be implemented in one place, or as close to one place as possible.
That's why good programmers often like terse languages. Terseness often makes things difficult to read, but it makes repetition and dependencies stick out like a sore thumb.
Sometimes the principle is referred to as DRY -- Don't Repeat Yourself, but in fact it's even more fundamental than that. Repeating yourself is lazy, but sometimes you doom yourself to future repetitions before you've begun repeating.
This explains why the initial versions of J2EE were bad. Too much ink was spilled over the amount of configuration and bookkeeping style programming forced on programmers. Some people rightly pointed out that it's really not that much to learn your way around these things, given what J2EE tries to do for you. But the real issue was the way that the decision to use the framework extruded itself into so many places, which was symptomatic of a faulty design. When Spring came along, the people who hated J2EE because of all the configuration took to it, even though Spring requires its own configuration files. The difference was a given decision clearly belonged in one and only one place: in the code or in the deployment configuration. Spring freed you, once more, to concentrate on one problem at a time.
Good design is a pleasure to work with for this reason, because it presents you with well contained problems to solve. Bad design is tedious to work with, because you must adjust your approach to each problem to so many prior "solutions".
Aside from that, I wonder if there is really that much practical value in researching new design principles. There's some value of course, but the worst perpetrator of bad designs is not bad design theories (which do exist), but bad organizations. You'd really need to work with a sociologist or anthropologist to describe why nearly everyone does less good design than they're capable of.
You have right of way on the 'rotary' (I assume that's the same as a roundabout), so slowing down in anticipation of someone entering the system is wrong
Well, I usually do accelerate in situations like this, in this case I didn't because the other car was moving very fast, and I don't exactly drive a sports car. It's hard to describe, but this guy just gave me a "I don't know you're there" vibe, like that feelign you get when somebody is talking on their cell and driving. I wanted him where I could see him, because I had a feeling he'd do something unpredictable when he noticed me, which turned out to be the case.
Driving defensively isn't all about giving way no matter what - it's about making sure that accidents don't happen, and sometimes assertiveness is the correct path.
Never said it was. In fact, I'm a pretty assertive driver -- most of us in my neck of the wood are. But I don't think you can make a blanket statement that you should always be assertive, any more than you say you should always give way. In particular, assertiveness doesn't do a damn thing for you if the other guy doesn't know you're there.
Always reacting the same way in some general situation like merging is bad advice, even if usually acting that way is a good idea. You have to make exceptions.
I think of defensive driving as having three components: (1) situational awareness, (2) projecting possible consequences and (3) situating yourself so you have manage things in light of the most probable outcomes.
If your situational awareness tells you that being assertive is the best way to avoid an accident, then it is the best way. If it overrules the normal right of way, you're better off listening to that, provided you have a few years of experience so your gut instincts count for something. As an extreme example, if you are approaching an intersection and a driver on the cross street is obviously going to run the light, you're sometimes better off lettting him go than trying to beat him.
I once was about to step into a crosswalk, when I found myself stepping back and dragging the person next to me along by the scruff of the neck. An instant later, a stolen car careened through the spot we'd been have been at. That's how legends of things like ESP get started; in fact having grown up in the city, I knew the sound of a driver trying to out run the police. My brain recognized it and took action before informing me of the fact.
good art? Then again, maybe "good" isn't the right criterion.
Yes, you could go the obvious way: images of fractals, MC Escher, art which visualizes mathematical concepts, either intentionally or (as in Hokusai's famous Wave) unitentionally. And perhaps this is the right way.
But first, ask yourself, why do you need art at all? Answer that question, and you're well on the way to answering what kind of art you "need".
You'll probably have multiple answers to that question, and each will suggest a different kind of art.
(1) Decoration. Anything that looks nice will do, although you will ideally choose things that aren't too obtrusive, but harmonize with the office environment.
(2) Make a statement. Well, what statement? Usually its a statement about who you are. If you want to say you are more than just uncultured geeks, then something with classical appeal. If you want to show that you are bona fide intellectuals, something more avante garde, although this might clash with the desire to decorate.
To make a statement about what you do, find unexpected examples of CS cropping up in art, or being artistic. For example, you could put up a number of large flat screen monitors that display continually changing, hyperrealistic computer generated landscapes. If it were me, the landscape would react to something, either the actual weather, or perhaps the academic calendar (e.g., "it's raining so midterms must be coming up.")
(3) Instruct. At one time, one of the most common types of poetry made was didactic; it was there not primarily for its aesthetic appeal (although it needed that), but to help the learner with difficult memorizations. While memorization isn't quite as important, there are other didactic functions art can perform.
For example, depictions of this history of computation might be an interesting choice, with portraits of important figures, diagrams and models of their inventions. Many technological items have an aesthetic appeal such as circuit boards and chips. You could display historic cicruit boards with notes on their significance; hang huge photographs of important ICs through the years. You could dissect hard drives of different eras and mount them tastefully in a frame, the way biology departments mount botanical and insect specimens.
(4) Be a Historical Document. I think the best thing would be to find art created by people working in the department: professors, workers, students. If there isn't enough, then perhaps you could add art selected by people working there with a little statement of why they like it. Over time, of course, the collection would expand, and need to be rotated in and out. Twenty years hence, people will come across something done by, or selected by, a person no longer in the department, and perhaps this will be remarkable to people who knew that person.
Characterizing "road rage" as "tasteless" is rather like characterizing "genocide" as "bad manners". Strictly speaking, it may be accurate, but it misses certain essential aspects of the thing.
I'd call road rage things like, "self-defeating", "stupid", and "irresponsible". It's self-defeating because it's reacting to danger by endangering yourself even more. That that is stupid is self-evident. It's irresponsible because it's not just a personal failing, it's a breach of a public duty to drive with reasonable caution.
I think this is very interesting because it is not just a correlation, but a suggestive one. It suggests to me that people who personalize a vehicle are more likely to treat the space around it as territory to be defended, rather than common space as it actually is.
It's true that it is important to anticipate situations. But it is equally important to leave your ego at home when you drive.
I once heard Jackie Stewart, the three time world champion Formula One driver, asked what it takes to be a great driver. His answer was, you have to be completely emotionless when you are behind the wheel.
This makes sense. The problem with emotions is that they hang around after they have done their work. When you drive, you have to work with the here and now. If somebody cuts you off, you have a brief surge of emotion that speeds your immediate reactions. Once you have avoided an accident, it's over, but you still have the emotion, which is no longer working for you, but against you.
I try to take the personal out of driving incidents. If somebody cuts me off, I remind myself that everybody gets distracted and makes mistakes, and that no harm has come. If somebody is driving in an aggressive or dangerous way, it does no good to label that driver an idiot, in fact it is harmful to have any attitude toward the driver at all. When something happens, I try to get to a place where I am in the moment, where the driver is a non-entity, and the car is a factor in the situation that has to be balanced with the other factors. If somebody cuts me off, his car just becomes another car in front of me. If somebody is weaving, his car becomes a car that makes unpredictable lane changes. If somebody is tailgating me, his car becomes one that has less braking time than it needs. If a cyclist is in an inconvenient place for me, he becomes a slow vehicle that needs plenty of lateral clearance.
Driving is simply a sequence of time critical problems to be solved, nothing more or less.
Let me illustrate. The other day, I was going 3/4 of the way around a very large rotary. The problem with large rotaries is that the speeds are too high to be safe. As I approached the half way point, I noticed a couple of young men in a muscle car approaching very quickly on an access road feeding the rotary, and reckoned that we'd meet right at the merge. Although I had the right of way, I decided to slow down and let him in ahead of me, because he showed no signs of changing his speed. However, that brought me to his attention, and he also slowed, matching my speed. A quick check in the rear view mirror showed that I didn't have any cars close behind, so I slowed more, and changed from the left (inside) lane, intending to abort the exit and take another circle around the rotary.
I had the other driver's attention now -- too much of it. He was mesmerized; I time I slowed, he slowed; he was paying no attention at all to his right, where he could easily escape the situation. Finally, he entered the rotary cutting across the left lane and coming to a complete stop directly in front of me, diagonally across most of my lane. He waved me ahead to pass him on his left, using a space that was just barely enough for me to squeeze by. By now cars were approaching from the rear, and I was uncertain they'd react in time. I also had no inclination to get in front of him, and in any case it would have been slow. Since he was at almost a 45 degree angle, I didn't want to go behind, in case he reacted to the oncoming traffic by backing up. So a waved him to go, so I could make a lane shift as he fully entered the left lane.
He reacted to this by hitting the accelerator hard. Since he was trying to make a sharp turn at the same time, the only thing that happened was that his left rear wheel spun, which made him floor it, which only made things worse. Instead of making headway, his front end didn't move at all, and his rear end began to drift farther into left. Pretty soon he'd be pointed the wrong way, towards me. A quick glance in the rear view mirror showed cars were still approaching from the rear, and although I couldn't judge whether they were reacting to the situation, I figured I had severa
Let me tell you how this goes. Somebody gets an idea that seems really neat. They see all kinds of benefits to this idea. Now you come in and decide to convince them it's really a bad idea. You each without thinking take up your debate club roles, him arguing the affirmative, you arguing the negative. Only in this debate, the opposing team is the judge.
It gets worse. This kind of thing gets emotional, because once somebody is enchanted with an idea, all those good things he imagines as a result seem to be within his grasp. You'll the one who is bent on taking all that away. It's an amazingly stupid attitude, if you think about it, but we all have it, hardwired in.
So, trust me, you you don't want to try to convince your boss not to do this. What you want to do is inform him. This means you must be totally fair, objective, balanced, and in no way an advocate of anything other than two things: having a complete plan for dealing with the results of the course of action, and knowing what the alternative courses of action entail.
The boss might even be right. If you aren't prepared for that possibility, you can't do this.
One thing is certain: if you plant the seeds of doubt in his mind, he'll look at those doubts as weeds. If he owns those doubts, he's more likely to let them bear fruit.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, their competitors made mistakes. So did Microsoft.
Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft Blackbird.
Etc.
The difference being that Microsoft had their monopoly to fall back on when their other attempts failed. Their competitors did not.
Bill is going for the "humble" bit now. But that's not how it happened.
It wasn't just the monopoly. It was how they used the financial strength to strengthen and extend that monopoly.
The 80s and early 90s were desktop software's landrush era. Too many companies acted like this was a mature market, when the key was grabbing all the customers you could early on to lock in future cash flow. Would be competitors tried to become premium brands and charged too much when they needed to grab customers. It was like establishing a "beachhead" just above the low-tide mark.
Many MS competitors also lost their credibility when they went from pushing customers onto their platform to abandoning it, repricing it, or repositioning it, effectively yanking it out from under them overnight.
Back in the early 90s, the Microsoft monopoly cast a pall over the industry. But many managers who knew Microsoft had inferior products, who detested its monopoly power, nonetheless trusted Microsoft. Microsoft used its cash to make things predictable. So, in 1996, a developer could jump on the Windows CE bandwagon, even if it would be five years or more before Microsoft overtook Palm. Microsoft understood the value of owning platform "real estate", and it used its cash reserves to keep projects that involved long term user and developer commitments alive. It never used its cash for paying dividends to stockholders.
Think about the vendors Microsoft failed to dislodge. There aren't many, but one that comes to mind is Oracle. Oracle isn't a "nice" company either, but it had two things going for it. It was consistent in the face of the Microsoft challenge, and it was flexible as well. You needed both. Oracle never redefined its core products in a way so radical it pulled the rug out from under it customers. On the other hand, it watched Microsoft carefully, ensuring it always had a slightly more powerful product at the same price for anything Microsoft had. They'd also happily take you to the cleaners if you didn't do your homework, but if you did do your homework and your people knew how to use it, you'd have no rational reason to jump to SQL Server unless you were the kind of manager who lets vendors make platform decisions for you.
Apple used to have a position in the high end corporate desktop. Truckloads of peecees were being delivered to the peons, but the executive offices were Mac territory. This obviously wasn't a sustainable position. Apple also lost developers because it showed itself ready to court them one day and piss on them the next. It was too inconsistent for a developer to trust, failing to finish promised technologies (Pink), pulling the plug on ones it delivered (OpenDoc), or leaving the future uncertain on others (AppleScript, which was abandoned then unabandoned). Many Apple developers after being burned a couple of times looked at the size of the peecee market, and jumped ship.
Novell, on the other hand, was constent in its core product, but it was too consistent, failing to react in a timely fashion to the customer need for a reasonably stable platform for third party services, then to the customer need to provide TCP/IP based services, and they were way late on providing a GUI that would make the product less forbidding for new customers.
These days, the "competitor" that replicates what is most attractive about Microsoft to the customer is open source. Open source also takes its time but gets there in the end. When you are doing software where the user is the critical interface, it's very hard to get it right the first time. Apple is one of the few vendors who usually does. Microsoft customer wisdom is to wait for version 3. My wife was asking me
You are dealing with a strawman. It's not that environmentalists aren't for renewable technologies, but that's a long term strategy. The one thing that every single environmentalist who isn't just a crackpot has been advocating for the last thirty years is energy efficiency, and that's a great, untapped resource today.
People are howling over gasoline prices, because they've got a huge fraction of their income invested in gas guzzlers they can't give away at current gas prices. If CAFE standards had been raised the way environmentalists have been suggesting for decades, then these people would be taking four dollar gas in stride.
As far as the nuclear -- er -- option is concerned, you're acting like environmentalists outlawed nuclear power. It's not illegal to build a nuke. Although pressure groups did play a role in inflating the cost of clearing regulatory hurdles, it's not really worse than other controversial things that developers do all the time. What really killed nuclear power was this: electric market deregulation and cheap, cheap fossil fuels.
The nuclear financial model is that you make a huge investment, but reap profits for years an years pretty much for the operation cost of the plant. In a way, it's not that different from the business model used by companies installing photovoltaic panels and charging a fixed price for the power produced to the site owner. Just on a massively larger scale.
Tweak the cost of electricity downward a bit, an that huge investment looks a lot less attractive.
Basically, they stopped building nukes because the designs they had weren't profitable to invest in. Pressure groups did play a role, but if you step back and look at everything else that happened in the energy market, it's a prety small one.
The question isn't whether the government can do this legally. The question is whether it is good for the country.
It's a hell of a lot different from building highway infrastructure. It's more like saying we're going to have 1,000,000 more Ford Explorers on the road in twenty years.
If you want a direct analog, then lets talk about a national superconducting grid that will allow producers anywhere to sell to any other part of the country. That would be good for the country. It would be good for the nuclear industry the way the highway system is good for the automobile industry. And it wouldn't give people choices rather than making choices for them.
The problem is with what economists call non-excludable benefits. Invest in a utility serving NYC, and you can richer. Invest in electrifying Podunk, you make the people Podunk a lot richer, but maybe not yourself. If the government doesn't provide for those people, they won't be provided for, even though it's a net win for everyone all around.
Since I'm a lot closer to socialism than you are, I probably can see more difference between state planning, socialism, and economic progressivism. They're three different things.
FDR wasn't a socialist, he was a pragmatist. He saw things that needed doing that the private sector wasn't going to, and he did them. I don't see the need for the government to say how many nukes we have. If the technology is there, and if the distribution infrastructure is there, both issues I think the government should be part of, then the right number of nukes will be built, along with the right number of wind farms, ocean thermal plants, photovoltaic plants, etc.
The problem is that computers are so darn useful, there's no way to make them so useful without making them useful for malware. The answer is, you build your own dedicated Skype phone that (a) only does Skype and (b) uses read only media for everything it can.
Personally, I wouldn't worry about bugs planted inside a phone, except possibly of software variety. How long before this happens with a smart phone? It's much easier to tap the lines for analog phones.
It was called the "planned economy". If you reckoned the economy needed 100 units of steel mills and 50 units of aluminum factories, but private individuals built 150 units of steel and 25 units of aluminum, you'd take money from steel to ensure that an additional 25 units of aluminum were brought online.
Not coincidentally corporate welfare is exactly the same thing, only you don't tell people they aren't allowed to build steel mills. Instead, you just take money away from everyone, and give it to the aluminum producers. As a result fewer of everything else gets built, including steel mills. What we have here is a proposal to have the government guarantee to the nuclear industry that at least two nuclear plants per year will be built on average, every year for the next twenty years.
Speaking as a free-spending political liberal, that's too much even for me. I'd be all for giving some government grants and regulatory relief to enable several pilot plants for new technologies to be built, to help the industry get back on its feet. But after that, they're on their own. I'm for technology research (which conservatives view as interfering with the market), but at least I don't think the government should be in the business of putting nuclear power's competitors out of business.
Oh, is the "Environmentalist Movement" the new "Democrat Party" now?
The truth is that the environmental movement is made up of all kinds of people, some of whom are of course luddites, some of whom are extremely technical, but get their techie jollies from things like energy saving technologies and alternative energy.
The problem is people who think they can solve the world's problems by selecting a label, applying it to people as a way of saying everything is their fault. This works when Mom and Dad are around to clean up the mess, but in the grown up world, you quickly find out that blaming somebody else doesn't get anything useful done.
The problem is too many people depending on somebody else to be the responsible adult.
The truth is that petroleum is a commodity that is, as far as we know, limited. Too many of us, however, acted like cheap oil was a permanent feature of the world. And now they're looking for somebody to gripe about.
So now it's the fault of the people who chose to drive the smallest car they could to cut down on pollution, or to live close to where they work, or to find a job where they could telecommute or take public transportation. Worse yet are the people who chose careers in things like alternative energy technologies and conservation. Nobody liked those people anyway, so it must be their fault we don't have fusion powered SUVs.
Well, I wouldn't say it's the best option.
In fact, the idea that we need to choose "an option" is what's broken about our politics. I agree, nuclear power has an important role to play in dealing with a transition to a post-petroleum economy. But I don't think people who look at it as a quick fix ought to be in charge of energy policy.
There's way too much talk about taking measures to bring energy prices down fast, and soon. Both parties do this. The Democrats want to punish the energy companies. The Republicans want to do things that will reward energy companies over the next four or five years by allowing them to drill in environmentally sensitive places. Neither of these are going to do much for the current situation, and both will do damage in the long term.
While it is true that today's petroleum prices are harbingers of things to come, they are also largely driven by speculation which performs an important economic function. In the relatively short term, prices will fall again, not to historic lows, but low enough to feel like relief. Then they will rise again. But the baseline prices will ratchet up, slowly. We can't deal with the long term problem by addressing the short term symptoms.
We can pump ANWR and the coastal reserves dry in a few decades, mainly to the benefit of other countries. Or we can bring some on line in the near future, and leave some in reserve against a future when today's energy prices would be a welcome relief. We can steadily develop our nuclear technology over the next twenty years, allowing the gradually rising cost of petroleum to do its work in fostering efficiency and innovation. Or we can build a lot of old tech plants NOW that will be very expensive to keep running and more expensive to shut down later.
Our current situation was not exactly impossible to predict. It was denial that made it a surprise. Now we're acting like the sky is falling, which is just the flip side of the same broken thinking. We need a more diverse energy portfolio, an energy distribution infrastructure that will support a more diverse portfolio, and greater efficiency. Nuclear power is part of that picture, over the next two or three decades. But it is not an "option" in the sense that it is a new basket in which we can put all of our energy eggs.
When something bad happens, and you fire somebody you are, by the strictest interpretation of the words, "doing something about it." It might not be anything effective, but if you don't know what is effective, then "doing something" sounds a lot better than "doing nothing."
Out of all the ineffective ways of of "doing something", firing somebody is the most attractive, because it localizes the blame in a person who is, or at least in short order will be, outside the organization. It is the solution that shifts the most blame. Since the person is outside the organization, he can't defend himself.
Unless he lawyers up.
Well, given that said company wants the country to do something about it, then whether the way they set and enforce prices is legal in that country is certainly a relevant question. If Microsoft is calling upon China to enforce its intellectual property laws, it can hardly complain if China agrees, but also insists on enforcing its anti-trust laws.
The United States is not a fascist state. Yet.
The truth is that democracies do most of the things that fascist states do. The difference is the rules (or lack of rules) under which they do them. Having the police break in the door of a private residence.... does that make a government fascist? Not if the occupants are on the upper floors shooting at passersby. Not if there is a proper warrant issued under rules which respect democratic principles. Although it is harsh, a democratic government can reasonably suspend the normal habeas corpus procedures in certain situations. But this doesn't mean the rights protected by those procedures disappear. That's why it is a "suspension". When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus,it was later ruled that convictions obtained under that situation were invalid, because the civil courts were capable of operation.
The important point is that the necessity of an extraordinary action for one purpose, like maintaining public order during an insurrection, is not a key to open up new government powers. That is the path to being a cryptofascist: start with things that even legitimate democracies do in extreme circumstances, then water down or twist the rules so that they don't limit anything you want to do. You don't want a unitary executive, even if might help the President protect you in a post 9/11 world, because that leaves you with no protection from him.
Any counterinsurgency manual is going to have a lot of ugly looking stuff in it, like warrantless searches. The questions are how and when are those procedures allowed, and how is accountability enforced? By far the most troubling powers the government claims for itself is the power to distort the truth, because that undermines two key principles of a free society: the autonomy of individual decision making, and the accountability of the government. Any process that corrupts individual decision making or allows the government to evade responsibility for its failures strikes at the foundation of democracy. Since we live in an era of global information, there is no difference between a psy-ops campaign aimed at a foreign population and one aimed at the electorate.
Giving misinformation about things like troop movements is both critical, and harmless to democracy. Claims that a program is working when it is not are probably inevitable. But controlling information to make things look more successful than they are is where a government crosses the line into authoritarianism.
Fortunately, I don't really believe that this kind of disinformation has all that much utility for the things we supposedly need them for. I just don't think you can effectively lie to the Iraqis about how well reconstruction is going, because the Iraqis are there. It's all well and good to get our point of view out there, but you can't tell people day is night when they can see for themselves. It's only the American people who are likely to be taken in.
In the long run, I think we're better off being credible when we talk about our successes and failures.
I mean, where are the true believers now? Does anyone seriously think that western governments have any kind of moral credibility?
But... but... but... our counterinsurgency tactics are working so well.
... and not, oh, an integrated diabetes management system, pill dispenser, etc... I wouldn't be too sure about that.Comes out a bit sharp, I hear.
I second the Moka machine. I've found the coarseness of the grind doesn't really make that much of a difference to how well it works. Sometimes it might leak a few drops around the seal, but it's not a critical problem. I've brewed American drip grind coffee (because it was all I had handy), and it came out as good as it ever does. It does fine with preground "espresso" grind coffee, producing as you say a cup of coffee that is perhaps a bit less syrup like than bar coffee, but every bit as tasty. Seriously, with a $20 pot, it's hardly worth worrying about if it will "work"; you just put water and grounds in and get coffee out a couple minutes later. It's not like you're going to void the warranty or something.
The Moka pot is extremely fast, and most importantly very easy to clean, which is the downfall of many coffee makers.
In fact it's so convenient I'm thinking of getting a single cup pot. Sometimes I get fresh dark roasted beans and put them in the freezer. Then when I want a cup of coffee I grind them in a brass Turkish coffee grinder, and brew them up in a Moka for a real treat -- better than what you get in most coffee bars over here. The problem is that it takes too long to hand grind enough coffee for six cups.
With a single cup pot I could go from whole beans in a freezer to a fresh cup of Moka in maybe five or six minutes.
I used to think about getting a home espresso machine, but since I've been using the Moka, I have lost interest. I actually think the Moka pot is cooler. The expensive machines like when you go to somebody's house and they pull out a bottle of $100 wine and it's pretty good. Of course it's good. The Moka machine is like going to somebody's house and drinking a great glass of wine, then he shows you the bottle and it has a $12 sticker on it. The guy who can find a great $12 wine is the one who really knows what he's doing.
If I had almost $2000 to drop on a coffee machine, I'd get a bean roaster, an electric grinder, and couple of 12 cup Moka pots. I'd be ready to churn out better coffee than any home machine, and faster too, with enough money left over to keep me supplied with top notch unroasted beans for a long time. You can get a 5lb bag of unroasted estate Jamaica Blue Mountain for a bit over $30, but roasted whole beans will set you back more like $40/lb.
Of course, I'm not really that into coffee (I can stop any time I want), so preroasted, preground coffee does fine for me.
Road rage may not be genocide, but it's a lot more than bad manners.
People indulging in road range may be brats taking an tantrum, but they're taking their tantrum with a deadly weapon.
The single, fundamental software design principle that underlies every other one is this: every decision should ideally be implemented in one place, or as close to one place as possible.
That's why good programmers often like terse languages. Terseness often makes things difficult to read, but it makes repetition and dependencies stick out like a sore thumb.
Sometimes the principle is referred to as DRY -- Don't Repeat Yourself, but in fact it's even more fundamental than that. Repeating yourself is lazy, but sometimes you doom yourself to future repetitions before you've begun repeating.
This explains why the initial versions of J2EE were bad. Too much ink was spilled over the amount of configuration and bookkeeping style programming forced on programmers. Some people rightly pointed out that it's really not that much to learn your way around these things, given what J2EE tries to do for you. But the real issue was the way that the decision to use the framework extruded itself into so many places, which was symptomatic of a faulty design. When Spring came along, the people who hated J2EE because of all the configuration took to it, even though Spring requires its own configuration files. The difference was a given decision clearly belonged in one and only one place: in the code or in the deployment configuration. Spring freed you, once more, to concentrate on one problem at a time.
Good design is a pleasure to work with for this reason, because it presents you with well contained problems to solve. Bad design is tedious to work with, because you must adjust your approach to each problem to so many prior "solutions".
Aside from that, I wonder if there is really that much practical value in researching new design principles. There's some value of course, but the worst perpetrator of bad designs is not bad design theories (which do exist), but bad organizations. You'd really need to work with a sociologist or anthropologist to describe why nearly everyone does less good design than they're capable of.
Well, I usually do accelerate in situations like this, in this case I didn't because the other car was moving very fast, and I don't exactly drive a sports car. It's hard to describe, but this guy just gave me a "I don't know you're there" vibe, like that feelign you get when somebody is talking on their cell and driving. I wanted him where I could see him, because I had a feeling he'd do something unpredictable when he noticed me, which turned out to be the case.
Never said it was. In fact, I'm a pretty assertive driver -- most of us in my neck of the wood are. But I don't think you can make a blanket statement that you should always be assertive, any more than you say you should always give way. In particular, assertiveness doesn't do a damn thing for you if the other guy doesn't know you're there.
Always reacting the same way in some general situation like merging is bad advice, even if usually acting that way is a good idea. You have to make exceptions.
I think of defensive driving as having three components: (1) situational awareness, (2) projecting possible consequences and (3) situating yourself so you have manage things in light of the most probable outcomes.
If your situational awareness tells you that being assertive is the best way to avoid an accident, then it is the best way. If it overrules the normal right of way, you're better off listening to that, provided you have a few years of experience so your gut instincts count for something. As an extreme example, if you are approaching an intersection and a driver on the cross street is obviously going to run the light, you're sometimes better off lettting him go than trying to beat him.
I once was about to step into a crosswalk, when I found myself stepping back and dragging the person next to me along by the scruff of the neck. An instant later, a stolen car careened through the spot we'd been have been at. That's how legends of things like ESP get started; in fact having grown up in the city, I knew the sound of a driver trying to out run the police. My brain recognized it and took action before informing me of the fact.
No, because if I maintained my speed around the rotary, we'd have collided.
good art? Then again, maybe "good" isn't the right criterion.
Yes, you could go the obvious way: images of fractals, MC Escher, art which visualizes mathematical concepts, either intentionally or (as in Hokusai's famous Wave) unitentionally. And perhaps this is the right way.
But first, ask yourself, why do you need art at all? Answer that question, and you're well on the way to answering what kind of art you "need".
You'll probably have multiple answers to that question, and each will suggest a different kind of art.
(1) Decoration. Anything that looks nice will do, although you will ideally choose things that aren't too obtrusive, but harmonize with the office environment.
(2) Make a statement. Well, what statement? Usually its a statement about who you are. If you want to say you are more than just uncultured geeks, then something with classical appeal. If you want to show that you are bona fide intellectuals, something more avante garde, although this might clash with the desire to decorate.
To make a statement about what you do, find unexpected examples of CS cropping up in art, or being artistic. For example, you could put up a number of large flat screen monitors that display continually changing, hyperrealistic computer generated landscapes. If it were me, the landscape would react to something, either the actual weather, or perhaps the academic calendar (e.g., "it's raining so midterms must be coming up.")
(3) Instruct. At one time, one of the most common types of poetry made was didactic; it was there not primarily for its aesthetic appeal (although it needed that), but to help the learner with difficult memorizations. While memorization isn't quite as important, there are other didactic functions art can perform.
For example, depictions of this history of computation might be an interesting choice, with portraits of important figures, diagrams and models of their inventions. Many technological items have an aesthetic appeal such as circuit boards and chips. You could display historic cicruit boards with notes on their significance; hang huge photographs of important ICs through the years. You could dissect hard drives of different eras and mount them tastefully in a frame, the way biology departments mount botanical and insect specimens.
(4) Be a Historical Document. I think the best thing would be to find art created by people working in the department: professors, workers, students. If there isn't enough, then perhaps you could add art selected by people working there with a little statement of why they like it. Over time, of course, the collection would expand, and need to be rotated in and out. Twenty years hence, people will come across something done by, or selected by, a person no longer in the department, and perhaps this will be remarkable to people who knew that person.
Characterizing "road rage" as "tasteless" is rather like characterizing "genocide" as "bad manners". Strictly speaking, it may be accurate, but it misses certain essential aspects of the thing.
I'd call road rage things like, "self-defeating", "stupid", and "irresponsible". It's self-defeating because it's reacting to danger by endangering yourself even more. That that is stupid is self-evident. It's irresponsible because it's not just a personal failing, it's a breach of a public duty to drive with reasonable caution.
I think this is very interesting because it is not just a correlation, but a suggestive one. It suggests to me that people who personalize a vehicle are more likely to treat the space around it as territory to be defended, rather than common space as it actually is.
It's true that it is important to anticipate situations. But it is equally important to leave your ego at home when you drive.
I once heard Jackie Stewart, the three time world champion Formula One driver, asked what it takes to be a great driver. His answer was, you have to be completely emotionless when you are behind the wheel.
This makes sense. The problem with emotions is that they hang around after they have done their work. When you drive, you have to work with the here and now. If somebody cuts you off, you have a brief surge of emotion that speeds your immediate reactions. Once you have avoided an accident, it's over, but you still have the emotion, which is no longer working for you, but against you.
I try to take the personal out of driving incidents. If somebody cuts me off, I remind myself that everybody gets distracted and makes mistakes, and that no harm has come. If somebody is driving in an aggressive or dangerous way, it does no good to label that driver an idiot, in fact it is harmful to have any attitude toward the driver at all. When something happens, I try to get to a place where I am in the moment, where the driver is a non-entity, and the car is a factor in the situation that has to be balanced with the other factors. If somebody cuts me off, his car just becomes another car in front of me. If somebody is weaving, his car becomes a car that makes unpredictable lane changes. If somebody is tailgating me, his car becomes one that has less braking time than it needs. If a cyclist is in an inconvenient place for me, he becomes a slow vehicle that needs plenty of lateral clearance.
Driving is simply a sequence of time critical problems to be solved, nothing more or less.
Let me illustrate. The other day, I was going 3/4 of the way around a very large rotary. The problem with large rotaries is that the speeds are too high to be safe. As I approached the half way point, I noticed a couple of young men in a muscle car approaching very quickly on an access road feeding the rotary, and reckoned that we'd meet right at the merge. Although I had the right of way, I decided to slow down and let him in ahead of me, because he showed no signs of changing his speed. However, that brought me to his attention, and he also slowed, matching my speed. A quick check in the rear view mirror showed that I didn't have any cars close behind, so I slowed more, and changed from the left (inside) lane, intending to abort the exit and take another circle around the rotary.
I had the other driver's attention now -- too much of it. He was mesmerized; I time I slowed, he slowed; he was paying no attention at all to his right, where he could easily escape the situation. Finally, he entered the rotary cutting across the left lane and coming to a complete stop directly in front of me, diagonally across most of my lane. He waved me ahead to pass him on his left, using a space that was just barely enough for me to squeeze by. By now cars were approaching from the rear, and I was uncertain they'd react in time. I also had no inclination to get in front of him, and in any case it would have been slow. Since he was at almost a 45 degree angle, I didn't want to go behind, in case he reacted to the oncoming traffic by backing up. So a waved him to go, so I could make a lane shift as he fully entered the left lane.
He reacted to this by hitting the accelerator hard. Since he was trying to make a sharp turn at the same time, the only thing that happened was that his left rear wheel spun, which made him floor it, which only made things worse. Instead of making headway, his front end didn't move at all, and his rear end began to drift farther into left. Pretty soon he'd be pointed the wrong way, towards me. A quick glance in the rear view mirror showed cars were still approaching from the rear, and although I couldn't judge whether they were reacting to the situation, I figured I had severa
is not to.
Let me tell you how this goes. Somebody gets an idea that seems really neat. They see all kinds of benefits to this idea. Now you come in and decide to convince them it's really a bad idea. You each without thinking take up your debate club roles, him arguing the affirmative, you arguing the negative. Only in this debate, the opposing team is the judge.
It gets worse. This kind of thing gets emotional, because once somebody is enchanted with an idea, all those good things he imagines as a result seem to be within his grasp. You'll the one who is bent on taking all that away. It's an amazingly stupid attitude, if you think about it, but we all have it, hardwired in.
So, trust me, you you don't want to try to convince your boss not to do this. What you want to do is inform him. This means you must be totally fair, objective, balanced, and in no way an advocate of anything other than two things: having a complete plan for dealing with the results of the course of action, and knowing what the alternative courses of action entail.
The boss might even be right. If you aren't prepared for that possibility, you can't do this.
One thing is certain: if you plant the seeds of doubt in his mind, he'll look at those doubts as weeds. If he owns those doubts, he's more likely to let them bear fruit.